Concieving Human Life

The Democratic ticket has been trying hard lately to frame abortion as an issue best left to theologians, not politicians. Senator Obama, when asked by George Stephanopoulos to clarify his view of the beginning of human life, explained that he doesn’t “presume to be able to answer these kinds of theological questions.” Likewise, Senator Biden, being interviewed on “Meet the Press,” admitted that he is “prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception.”

Yuval Levin at the National Review doesn’t buy it :

Both insist that the question of when a human life begins is a theological question, and so one without a generally applicable answer. But in fact, the question of when a new human life begins is not fundamentally a theological question but a biological question. After conception is concluded, a new biological organism exists that did not exist before — a member of our species in every way, alive and human. That is when the life of that human being starts. That life will proceed in one continuous path until death, whether that comes days later in a lab dish, months later in a clinic, or decades later in a nursing home surrounded by children and grandchildren. Human life has a straightforward scientific definition, and its beginning in biological terms is complicated only by questions about the process of conception itself. When conception is completed and a developing embryo exists, a life has begun.

It’s clear why Obama and Biden would want to portray the ethics of abortion as a theological opinion. Less clear, however, is whether such a strategy can convince a public whose default mode of thought is scientific, not theological.